Rightwards Arrow

About this character

U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW is the most-used arrow in Unicode. It dates from the original Unicode 1.0 (1991) Arrows block, where it sits alongside its three orthogonal companions — U+2190 ← LEFTWARDS, U+2191 ↑ UPWARDS, and U+2193 ↓ DOWNWARDS — and a dense cluster of variant arrows: dashed, double-headed, with hooks, with tails, paired, broken, and curved. The block was deliberately overpopulated: arrows are heavily used in technical writing and the standard wanted to encode each variant as a distinct character rather than relying on font choice or styling.

The rightwards arrow has accumulated more semantic meanings than most punctuation. In propositional logic it denotes material implication: P → Q reads "if P, then Q". In set theory and category theory it is the morphism arrow: f: A → B. In chemistry it indicates the products of a reaction: 2H₂ + O₂ → 2H₂O. In type theory and many programming languages with annotations it separates function arguments from return types (Haskell: String → Int; TypeScript arrow functions; Rust function signatures). In linguistic notation it marks rewriting rules (NP → Det N). And in everyday user-interface writing it indicates a menu path: File → Open.

For most of these uses the plain rightwards arrow is correct. A few contexts call for variants. The double arrow U+21D2 ⇒ is the conventional symbol for logical entailment, distinguishing it from material implication. U+27F6 ⟶ LONG RIGHTWARDS ARROW is used in mathematical typesetting where a longer body is wanted, often with a label written above. U+21A6 ↦ RIGHTWARDS ARROW FROM BAR ("maps to") is the function-element arrow: x ↦ x². Emoji-style arrows like U+27A1 ➡ and U+2794 ➔ live in the Dingbats block. The Bidi class of U+2192 is ON (Other Neutral), which means the arrow takes its direction from surrounding strong-directional characters in bidirectional text — and the standard also marks it as a mirrored character, so right-to-left contexts may render the visually mirrored U+2190 in its place.